Cisco's Sliding But Still Dominates Routers

ENP Profiles: Even if Cisco has been losing share in the last year, it enjoys an almost instant association with enterprise routers among network admins. How do recent redesigns of its branch office router line affect price and performance? ENP takes a look.

If you play word association with a network administrator and say "router," the chances are pretty high that the response you get back will be "Cisco."

This doesn't reflect a lack of imagination on the part of NAs, it's just that Cisco Systems has a vast share of the router market – about 58 per cent according to San Jose, CA-based research house Infonetics. Cisco, also based in San Jose, addresses the SOHO market with its Linksys division, and the SMB, enterprise and service provider markets with its bewildering range of Cisco products. Although Cisco's share of the overall router market has been falling sharply over the last 12 months – no doubt to the delight of rival Juniper Networks – Cisco still the lion's share of the enterprise router market, which Juniper has as yet failed to penetrate significantly.

In the enterprise space the models that matter cater for branch and head offices – which effectively means the new 1800, 2800, and 3800 series Integrated Services Routers (ISRs) in branches and the 7200 series routers at head office.

The new branch office routers build on the older and perhaps more familiar 1700, 2600, and 3700 series multiservice access routers, but have been redesigned from the ground up, with the result that they are both cheaper and offer higher performance than their predecessors.

As the name suggests, the integrated services routers offer a range of services built in to the router, including telephony and call processing (except in the 1800) and security management including hardware encryption acceleration, IPSec VPN, and URL filtering. Most importantly, all these extra services can be switched on without having a negative impact on the underlying performance of the router itself – all services can operate while the router is forwarding packets at line speed, Cisco claims.

"In the past, services have been rolled out at head offices, but many companies now want to push out these services to branches," says Neil Walker, a Cisco Systems router product manager. "These Integrated Services Routers enable the rollout of services deeper into the enterprise without any performance hit."

The 1800 series is targeted at smaller branch offices which may have a T1 or E1 connection, and can at run up to a 2mbps throughput. The 2800 is aimed at companies with larger branches, using multiple T1, E1 or DSL links, while the 3800, not surprisingly, is more powerful still, with up to a T3 or E3 capacity.

A likely scenario for a large organization is to have multiple 1800 devices aggregating in to 2800s, aggregating in turn to 3800s, connecting to a 7200 series head office router.

The routers in the new ISR range all run Cisco IOS and are highly modular so that each device can effectively be customized. All have a central data pump – an Asic-based packet forwarding engine – and a Motorola PowerPC CPU which runs service modules and spends its life providing higher order functions such as voice and security services. Extra slots are provided in the router for additional cards supporting services like advanced encryption hardware and network analysis.

Walker believes that by building complex routers that incorporate multiple network services, it paradoxically makes life simpler. "With an integrated services router, you can add voice, data, security, firewalls, and remote administration to a single device. Just like any router, if you pour coffee down the back of it by mistake it will break, but if you have two, you have fantastic resilience. If you had routing, switching, security, IPPBX devices separately you would need five devices, and ten for redundancy. So now you can drive these services out to remote branch offices, where previously you wouldn't dream of it."